Some of the tips in this video include a few things I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, including how important it is to set the ValueColumn property on your dimension attributes in SSAS MD – it lets you use lots of functionality in Power BI that isn’t otherwise available, including date slicers.

It may not be immediately obvious, but you cannot set your own connection string properties when connecting to SQL Server using the built-in SQL Server connector from either Power BI or a modern data source in Azure SSAS/SSAS Tabular 2017:

All you can do is configure the options that are available in the UI, which in the current version of SSDT looks like this:

It turns out that the restriction on using your own connection string properties in the built-in SQL Server connector is a deliberate design decision on the part of the Power Query team because, behind the scenes, they use different providers in different circumstances to optimise performance, and because allowing arbitrary connection string properties might make maintaining backwards compatibility difficult in the future.

While your average Power BI user is unlikely to even notice this, for SSAS Tabular developers it could be a big problem: complete control over the connection string is often necessary in enterprise BI scenarios. What are the alternatives then? Well you can use the OLE DB and ODBC connectors instead:

Both of these connectors do allow you to set your own connection string properties. For example here’s the UI for a new ODBC connection in SSDT:

However, apart from possible performance differences between the two (which you should test yourself – Henk van der Valk wrote a good post on this for SSAS MD and most of what he said is relevant for Tabular) there’s one less-than-obvious difference between these two options: the OLE DB connector does not appear to support query folding right now whereas the ODBC connector does. Of course this isn’t an issue if you’re writing your own SQL queries to import data, but if you do want to use M functions for partitioning (as I show here) you’re likely to get very poor performance with the OLE DB connector.

While the integration of the Power Query engine into Analysis Services Tabular 2017 and Azure Analysis Services with modern data sources will certainly bring a lot of benefits, I think it’s fair to say that the implementation has not been entirely painless. One problem is that it is no longer obvious how to specify your own SQL query to populate a table or partition in your Tabular model – and while the Query Editor is great, there are a lot of cases where this is necessary. In this post I’ll show you how to do this.

If you’re used to using the Power Query UI in Excel or Power BI Desktop, you’ll notice that when you connect to a SQL Server database using the SQL Server connector in SSDT:

…there is no option to enter your own SQL query when you do so:

This is deliberate. In Analysis Services, unlike Power BI and Excel, there is a distinction made between data sources and other M queries that return data from those data sources, one that makes a lot of sense in my opinion. While it is possible to enter your own SQL for other data source types, such as OLE DB connections, a data source object is really intended just to define a connection to a data source and not to define what data you want from that data source.

[You may also notice that there’s a “SQL statement” property on a SQL Server data source visible in the Visual Studio properties pane, but I don’t recommend you use it – it doesn’t seem to work well with the rest of the SSDT/Power Query UI]

To import a table or view in your database all you have to do is right-click on your data source and choose Import New Tables; my blog post from September last year describes how to do this, and how to use M functions for creating partitions.

To use your own SQL queries though you need to write some M code. First, import a table – any table, but preferably a small one – and get to the Query Editor UI. In this case I’ve imported the DimDate table from the Adventure Works DW database:

Next, select your query in the Queries pane on the left-hand side of the screen and open the Advanced Editor either by clicking on the relevant button in the toolbar (shown above) or by right-clicking on the query name in the Queries pane. You’ll see the following dialog:

Here what I’ve done is replaced the dbo_DimDate step in the previous query with a step called MyQuery that uses Value.NativeQuery() to run my own SQL.

Now all you need to do is click Import and you have the output of the query loaded into SSAS. It would be nice if there was UI support for using your own SQL queries when importing data in the future. Note that, as soon as you use this method, any other steps or queries further downstream will not be able to perform query folding, so you should make sure that you do as much of your filtering and transformation in the SQL as possible otherwise you may encounter performance problems.

The documentation describes a similar – but not identical – workflow for achieving the same result here. Personally I think it’s counter-intuitive that you should click on Expressions to create a Table object! Expressions are used for functions and other M code that is shared by the M queries used by Tables.

An alternative to doing all this is to go back to the old way of doing things and use a legacy data source rather a modern data source in SSDT. You lose the ability to use the Query Editor and M if you do this, but in a lot of cases you probably won’t care. The 17.4 release of SSDT for Visual Studio 2015, released in December 2017, has exposed a property that allows you to create legacy data sources again easily. In Visual Studio, go to the Tools menu and select Options and in the Options dialog go Analysis Services Tabular/Data Import and check “Enable legacy data sources”:

When you do this, you’ll notice two new options when you right-click on Data Sources in the Tabular Model Explorer pane: Import From Data Source (Legacy) and Existing Connections (Legacy).

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The Query Editor in Power BI/Excel Get&Transform/Power Query has a number of built-in ways to filter data in date columns relative to the current date, such as the “In the Previous” option. However these filters behave in a way I find non-intuitive (and I’m not alone) and it’s not obvious how to get the behaviour I think most people would expect. In this post I’ll show you what the built-in relative date filters actually do and how you can get change them to do something more useful.

Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you’re using the following table of dates (in DD/MM/YYYY format) in an Excel table as a data source:

Now, let’s also assume that the today’s date is January 8th 2018 and you only want to load data from the last six months. If you load the data into Power BI in a new query:

…and then click on the dropdown menu in the top right-hand corner of the Date column (highlighted), you can select Date Filters/In the Previous:

…and then set up the filter for “Keep rows where ‘Date’ is in the previous 6 months” as shown here:

…you get the following table back:

Six out of the seven dates in the original table are returned, but not the six I would expect. Remember that today’s date is January 8th 2018, and notice that January 1st 2018 is not present in the filtered table and July 1st 2017 is present! I don’t know about you, but I would say that January 1st 2018 should be considered as being “in the previous 6 months” and July 1st 2017 should not be.

The reason this is happening is that the M code generated by the UI uses the Date.IsInPreviousNMonths function, so as a result the filter is getting all the dates that are present in the six months before the month that today’s date is in. Hmmmmm.

In many cases you can get a “last six months” filter of the type I would expect quite easily, by altering the filter dialog box shown above to filter by the last 5 months and including an Or condition that also filters by the current month, like so:

This returns the following table:

You’ll see now that January 1st 2018 is present and July 1st 2017 is not present. However you will need to be careful with this: if your source data contains dates that are after today’s date but in still in the current month, these dates will now also be included! For example, if the source data is changed to include a new row for January 31st 2018:

This new filter will include January 31st 2018 because it is in the same month as today’s date:

What if you want to exclude dates that are after today but in the current month? This is where things get tricky, and where you’ll need to write some M code. Let’s imagine that you want to get all the dates that occur in the range July 9th 2017 (the day after the date that is six months before today) and January 8th 2017 (today). You can do this by editing the original query as follows:

In this query, the EndDate step returns today’s date using DateTime.FixedLocalNow(), the StartDate step returns the day after the date that is six months before today’s date, and the FilteredRows step filters the dates so that only those that occur between StartDate and EndDate are returned. And yes, I checked, if you do this with a SQL Server data source then query folding does occur.

With this query, you finally get the dates you’d expect from your filter:

Building aggregations in your SSAS Multidimensional will make your queries faster, right? While that’s true, they will only make a noticeable difference to performance if your query has Storage Engine-related problems rather than Formula Engine-related problems. What’s more, even when do you have Storage Engine-related problems there are some cases where you may find that aggregations don’t give you the kind of performance boost that you expect. In this post I’ll explain why this can happen, how you can use the Resource Usage Profiler event (as described in parts 1 and 2 of this series) to find out when this is happening, and how you can deal with the problem.

Aggregations make queries go faster for two reasons:

Most importantly they contain pre-aggregated data. For example your fact table might contain data at the Day granularity but an aggregation might contain fact data aggregated up to the Year granularity. This means that when a query needs to get data at the Year granularity, SSAS does not need to read the fact table-level data stored in the partition, it can read the data it needs direct from the aggregation without needing to aggregate any data at query time.

Secondly, because the size of an aggregation is usually a lot smaller than the size of the fact table-level data stored in a partition, it is much faster to read data from an aggregation.

However, regarding this second point, there’s a catch: you’ll know if you’ve read the previous posts in this series that SSAS builds indexes on fact data so it can scan that data very quickly, but most builds of SSAS do not build indexes on aggregations. I say ‘most’ because there were a few builds of SSAS that did build indexes on aggregations, but as this article explains this feature was turned off soon after it was introduced because it was found that the time spent building those aggregations was not usually worth any gain in query performance that resulted.

…the Resource Usage event shows that when run on a cold cache and no aggregations are built on the cube, SSAS scans 256 out of 5000 fact rows of data – a single page – and returns one row:

However if this cube has an aggregation built on the ID attribute of the ID dimension, the same granularity as the fact table:

…when the query runs and SSAS reads data from this aggregation rather than the fact data, the Resource Usage event returns the following:

Notice that the ROWS_SCANNED value is now 5000. This is because the aggregation has no indexes built on it so SSAS has to scan all the rows in the aggregation. Reading data from an aggregation at the same granularity as the fact data is therefore a lot less efficient than reading data from the original fact data.

Of course, since most aggregations are usually much smaller than the original fact data, the lack of indexes is not so important because scanning all the data is going to be very quick anyway. However, on very large cubes you may need to build some very large aggregations and find that even when your queries hit these aggregations, performance is still bad because of this lack of indexes. If you see this happening, and can see the ROWS_SCANNED value in the Resource Usage event reporting very high values, then it might be a good idea to enable the building of indexes on aggregations.

You can do this by changing the values of the AggIndexBuildEnabled and AggIndexBuildThreshold server properties in the msmdsrv.ini file. Setting AggIndexBuildEnabled to 1 allows SSAS to build indexes on aggregations. It’s not necessary to build indexes on all aggregations though: you can specify that only aggregations larger than a certain number of rows have indexes built using the AggIndexBuildThreshold property. The only public documentation for these properties is given in two articles here and here, and I strongly recommend you read these articles so that you understand the implications of doing this on your processing times. You should only consider changing these properties if you are a very experienced SSAS developer and you monitor the effects carefully – I’m not even sure if changing these properties is supported by Microsoft.

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As well as being a blogger, I'm an independent consultant specialising in Analysis Services, MDX, DAX, Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot. I work with customers from all round the world solving design problems, performance tuning queries and delivering training courses, and I am happy to work on short-term engagements. For more details see http://www.crossjoin.co.uk